NOVEL NEXT 106 - Archmund is Completely Stable and Nonthreatening
As drops of black blood slipped off her hand, Beatrice again thought that she hated this shit.
It wasn't that bad though.
She thought back to one of the poems of the Alexandrian poetic canon, as laid out by Alexander Omnio I when he'd conquered the known world and created civilization.
"Odi et amo." I hate and I love.
Her parents and tutors had forced her to memorize as much of the Alexandrian poetic canon as she could, which she'd done a good enough job of, and yet down here, as she slashed her knife straight through a Monster's spine, she really felt like there wasn't much of a point in doing so.
Supposedly you needed a well-rounded education, to be a noble lady suitable for the upper echelons of society. You needed to understand the unspoken rules of society if you wished to live a good life and do your family proud.
Supposedly.
You could get immensely rich Dungeon delving if you were skilled enough to not die. You'd be an outcast from high society, but that didn't really matter if you had the money to do whatever you wanted. No amount of money could buy you acceptance in the upper class, but if you didn't care about that, you could live as well as any noble.
And that path to wealth was even easier if the Monsters were somehow made sitting ducks.
Not for the first time, she felt a pang of resentment towards Archmund.
The rudest person she'd ever met.
Her cousin. The last surviving one in the Duchy, at least.
They were awfully alike, and yet different in so many ways.
She'd spent so much time studying useless things and from what she'd heard he'd spent the better part of five years crying his eyes out. Yet somehow once they'd met again, somehow she'd been the one who came across as a crybaby.
It was awfully unfair.
All of it.
Somehow, he was the one who got to sit in an office like their parents and mess with his magic tablet and turn the wheels of wealth. Meanwhile, she was out here, getting her hands dirty, in front of fearsome-looking Monsters. He said they wouldn't do anything, but if they did, she'd be the one who had to fight them all off on her lonesome.
He reaped the rewards, while everyone else took all the risk.
Her Gemstone Keycard vibrated.
She read:
[Come back. Have update to instructions. Abandon current projects.]
It was a curt message. Did he think she was illiterate, or something?
Then she remembered Mary, who probably was illiterate.
She shook her head. What was he thinking? Just treating a servant not just as a member of the household but as practically a member of his family? Was he really that socially unaware, or did his impropriety know no bounds?
Either way, she started heading back.
The Monsters stood stalk-still behind her.
Creepy.
She had always prided herself on her punctuality, even if she didn't always make the best first impression, but some small part of her was was glad she was the first to arrive back at the mysterious office, with that great window to that unknowable blue.
She was actually older than Archmund, believe it or not. Even though she was now shorter, and he didn't seem to remember that fact.
She wasn't expecting much to have changed. Just the same regal looking desk, the mysterious ornaments and displays along the walls, and the overpowering light of the blue window.
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She was wrong.
The room had been trashed. The ornaments were scattered around, and even though she knew they were just Dungeon-junk, mimicry of fineries from the living world, she felt a pang of regret at the beauty that had been tarnished. There were stains on the floor of miasma, somehow persisting beyond death.
"What the hell happened here?" Beatrice asked.
Archmund glanced up.
"You're back. You the first?"
"Uh huh," Beatrice said. "What happened here?"
"I was experimenting," Archmund said. He seemed a bit manic, and the corners of his mouth were quirked up in a grin. "I was testing out the limits of this new Influence Skill. Let me show you!"
He went to his desk and tapped on the surface a bit. It was an odd motion — Beatrice would've expected him to tap on keys like he was playing a piano or pipe organ, or to scribble as if he was writing instructions in a book, but he seemed to be tapping and swiping. What manner of magical tool operated like that?
A humanoid Monster walked out of the nearest pool of miasma. It stood still.
"You watching?" Archmund said.
Beatrice looked at the Monster. She nodded.
"Kill yourself," Archmund said to the Monster.
It seemed absurd. Even if he had what passed for their minds under his control, surely they had some survival instinct. That was why she was even needed for this. She had to land the killing blow, because the Monsters weren't going to take care of themselves.
For a moment, she thought she was right.
Then the Monster started vibrating. Slowly at first, so slowly that she thought it was a flaw of her eye. But then faster, faster, faster, as if its edges were a blur.
Then it began to crumple, folding in on itself. Its face inverted. Its arms bent backwards, yet there was no sound of joints cracking. Its neck was sucked into its torso. Every limp, every extremity collapsed, crumpling and compressing, becoming a solid black orb — and then a perfect Gem.
In less than ten seconds, the Monster had killed itself in a clean and efficient way.
Archmund walked over and picked up the Gem.
Beatrice swallowed. "You can just… say things… and people will obey?"
Would that command work on her?
"Not people," Archmund corrected her. "They're already dead, aren't they? It's not really killing itself, like this."
She swallowed again. She was pretty sure he'd said "Kill yourself".
"It's not even the most effective technique. For my purposes, it's more effective to tell them to suffer. Makes them boost their Willpower more cleanly than telling them to kill themselves."
Would that work on her?
Beatrice swallowed again, and then she started coughing. She'd choked on her own spit. "Were you always like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like… this."
"I'm not going to understand what you mean if you just repeat yourself like this," he said. "Can you explain it more clearly?"
"You just casually told a Monster to kill itself and it listened," Beatrice said. "Are you used to telling things to kill themselves?"
Then she wondered why she'd said that.
Usually she was more evasive. She would have evaded the question instead of running her mouth. It seemed, in a few words, risky.
If she reflected on what she'd been doing for the past few hours, she'd been a tad… measured. Usually, she hated this sort of stupid tedious busywork. She'd do it if her parents or tutors were telling her to, because she had so much to gain — her inheritance and her birthright, for example.
So why was she listening to her little cousin, of all people?
"I… huh," Archmund said. "You might be right there."
Beatrice gave him a thin smile. "So you do have some standards."
"Of course I do," Archmund said. "But you see the vision, right?"
"Explain it to me."
And Archmund did. It was a sensible plan. He'd figured out a way to use his control of the Dungeon to create Gems that could enhance purely physical or mental abilities. He wanted her to go and help with this plan. Because she didn't have any powers that could attack the mind, her job would be to create Gems that could boost Constitution.
Beatrice had heard rumors that the Sacred Dungeon of the Church and the Omnio Dungeon of the Empire and the Arcane Dungeon of the University all produced Gems of standardized properties. For properly raised nobles, the finer details of one's Gem were to be treated as closely-guarded secrets. You never knew when having a secret technique might save your life from a duel challenge or an assassin, after all, though duels to the death were mostly a thing of the past. So while all the well-educated suspected that the Three Civilized Dungeons were actually under an elaborate system of control that enabled them to churn out much more consistent Gems than your average adventurer-accessible Dungeon, this was the closest she'd ever come to confirmation.
Obviously those factions could create much more sophisticated Gems than just buffing either the mind or the body, but they'd had literal centuries of practice. The Imperial Family's fabled Pantheon Gems and the Mages' Elemental Gems and, rumor had it, the Church's Blessings were just a much more elaborate form of what her cousin had managed here.
"This stays between us, of course," Archmund said. "Us and everyone else here. Don't want an edge this juicy getting out into the world."
…and there went any chance of her capitalizing on this one. As much as she would've liked to ignore him, she was more than aware of the danger. If she let the secret slip, she'd be in as much danger as he was.
"Anyways," Archmund said, tossing her a Gem. "Try this one on for size."
She caught it, and her magic bloomed into it. She actually staggered back on her feet. It was like she'd suddenly stuck her face into the path of a raging waterfall. "What does this do?"
"Makes you smarter. Wiser. More charming," he said. "I'm hoping it makes your personality more bearable."
"But it doesn't have an Enchantment."
"Why would it need to?" Archmund said. "Once you Awaken it, you'll be able to use it for… whatever you want. I think."
"Why are you giving me this?" she said.
He grimaced. "Because…"
It was as if he was forcing himself to say words he didn't fully believe.
"Because we're family."